Symposium to look at constitutionalism during war on terror Several nationally known scholars will also participate. The event will be from 8:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Cartwright Hall. This symposium is the first in the country to examine both the domestic and foreign implications for constitutionalism of the war on terror. Dunham was the attorney for Yaser Hamdi — one of the individuals President Bush designated as an enemy combatant. Hamdi is an American citizen who was captured with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Dunham has also served as shadow counsel for Zacarias Moussaoui, an alleged Sept. 11 co-conspirator who has represented himself in court proceedings. As an enemy combatant, however, Hamdi was not allowed access to a court, even to challenge the correctness of the combatant classification. This meant that initially he was held in detention, interrogated repeatedly, and yet never charged with a crime nor allowed a lawyer by the Bush Administration. Eventually, at the urging of Dunham and others, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that the Bush Administration policy towards enemy combatants was unconstitutional. The court held that Hamdi had a constitutional right to "receive notice of the factual basis for his classification, and a fair opportunity to rebut the Government's factual assertions before a neutral decision-maker." Following the decision, the U.S. government released Hamdi with certain conditions and allowed him to join his father in Saudi Arabia. At the symposium, Dunham will discuss his experiences in a presentation titled "Where Hamdi Meets Moussaoui in the War on Terror." Dunham's presentation will be part of the symposium's first panel, which will discuss "The Enemy Combatant Cases." The speaker who follows Dunham will likely take a very different view. Douglas Kmiec is the Caruso family chair and professor of Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University School of Law. He is also a former high-ranking legal official in the Reagan and Bush I Administrations. His talk is titled "Observing the Separation of Powers — The President's War Power Necessarily Remains 'The Power to Wage War Successfully.'" He will argue that the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdi did not change the fact that the judiciary should be very respectful of the president's authority to fight the war on terror aggressively and with all available tools. The last speaker on this panel is Mark Drumbl, a prominent international law scholar from Washington and Lee University Law School. Professor Drumbl will examine whether the U.S. government's actions in holding detainees at Guantanamo, Cuba, meet international legal standards. Besides the domestic war on terror, the post Sept. 11 world has witnessed constitutional revisions in nations such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Russia. The United States has played a particularly influential role in the "reconstruction" of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the constitutional processes there. This involvement raises important questions such as whether their charters should be secular or Islamic, and whether their charters can be legitimate given the American role. The symposium's second panel will address these topics. The panel is titled "Constitutionalism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Emerging Nations." The initial speaker, professor Nathan Brown, posted the first English translation of the Interim Iraqi Constitution on his Web site. Brown will discuss "Constitutionalism, Authoritarianism, and Imperialism in Iraq." He works at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where he is on leave from his position as director of Middle Eastern Studies at George Washington University. The next speaker will be Said Arjomand, one of the nation's leading experts on Islamic constitutionalism. America's ability to understand that tradition may well be crucial to the success of this nation's foreign policy. Professor Arjomand will talk on "Constitutional Developments in Afghanistan: A Comparative and Historical Perspective." He is the inaugural Crane fellow and visiting professor of public affairs at Princeton University. The final speaker, professor Kim Lane Scheppele from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, has been a pioneer in the field of comparative constitutional law. Professor Scheppele's presentation is titled "We Forgot About Ditches: Russia's Constitutional Peregrinations." She will examine the practical difficulties that often get in the way of Russia's movements towards constitutional government. The public is welcome to attend the symposium. The fee is $30 but the event is free for students. All of the proceedings will be published at a later date in the Drake Law Review. Issues of the review may be purchased in advance for $10. For information about registration, contact Ginnie Nevis at (515) 271-2988 or e-mail In the dank recesses of a Drake University-rented warehouse on Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway, Mark Hines discovered an old friend. Hines, a Drake maintenance supervisor, was cleaning out the warehouse about a year ago when, behind a set of battered old junk doors, he saw a round wooden disc that looked awfully familiar. He brushed off decades worth of dust and realized what he held in his hand was the last surviving memento of the founding of Drake – a section from the trunk of the Chancellor’s Elm. “I knew right away what it was,” Hines said. “I was glad I found it before somebody who didn’t know what it was threw it out.” According to University lore, George Carpenter, the University’s first chancellor, climbed an elm tree in the densely wooded area that became Drake and said, “Here we will build our university.” That tree stood near the southeast corner of Old Main until 1969, when Dutch elm disease killed it and nearly every other elm west of the Mississippi. Hines started work in 1967 and the tree was already suffering the disease’s effect. He and other maintenance crew members injected turpentine into the bark – a remedy that was supposed to hold off the disease, alas to no avail. Hines worked with the crew that finally cut the elm down two years later. He used some of the wood for special gifts to University VIPs, such as fashioning four gavels for Drake Law School graduates who became members of the Iowa Supreme Court. In 1969, Hines preserved a cross-section of the elm with a special resin to prevent wood decay. A biology professor at the time counted the rings and dated the tree’s origin to 1763, well before the Revolutionary War. Hines added markers for important moments in U.S. history, including George Washington’s election as president and the Civil War. At the time, Hines had wanted to build a display case for the elm, but the University didn’t want to spend the money. Eventually, after years of display in various buildings, the tree section was shuffled off to the warehouse. “It had probably been in storage at least 20 years,” Hines said. “There was a big crack in the bottom of it that came from moisture and expansion. But we’ve got it back now.” Hines spent a year cleaning up the disc. He got to build that display case after all with the help of Facilities Services workers Terry Barnes, Kevin Pendras and Steve Schlegel. A pair of professor Tom Rosburg’s biology students, Ashley Wick and Lena Fox, counted the rings of the tree again and Hines reapplied the historical markers and mounted the entire piece inside a blonde wood case. The wood section now hangs outside President David Maxwell’s office in Old Main, looking out a east-facing window about 30 yards from where the tree stood for 206 years. Said Hines, “It’s home now.” Drake University's Writers and Critics Series has added an event to the spring lineup featuring Stephen Cope, an accomplished writer who has published poems, essays and reviews in publication such as XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Mirage: A Period(ical), Shark and The Germ. Cope will read from his work and discuss writing at 8 p.m. Monday, April 4, in the Honors Lounge of Medbury Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Cope served as guest editor of The Review of Contemporary Fiction's special issue on the work of David Antin in 2001. He is now editing the collected prose and selected papers of George Oppen for the University of California Press. He teaches creative writing and American Literature at Drake, where he is visiting assistant professor of English. The Writers and Critics Series events are made possible by the Drake English Department and the Humanities Center. First-year Drake Law School students recently presented a revised version of the Iowa Lawyer’s Oath to members of the Iowa Supreme Court and the Iowa State Bar Association Board of Governors. Both groups approved the students’ suggestion for the revised oath, which include emphasizing lawyers’ obligations to the practice of law and the importance of professional codes of conduct. The students next plan to rally the Iowa State Bar Association to change the Iowa law and assist the Supreme Court in promoting the proposed changes. More than 20 first-year law students worked on the revisions as part of adjunct professor and United States Magistrate Judge Celeste F. Bremer’s academic success course program. The course is designed to help first-year law students learn to think like lawyers and to learn about the legal profession. Judge Bremer, who earned her doctorate in education from Drake, values experiential learning – which moves beyond theory and practice and immerses students in a topic in order to deepen their understanding. Tim Russert, managing editor and moderator of "Meet the Press," will discuss "Washington From the Inside Out" as part of the Martin Bucksbaum Distinguished Lecture Series at Drake University on Tuesday, April 5. The lecture will start at 7 p.m. in the Drake University Knapp Center. After the lecture, Russert will attend a reception and book signing. All of the events are free and open to the public. In addition to his work on "Meet the Press," Russert serves as senior vice president and Washington bureau chief of NBC News and is a political analyst for "NBC Nightly News" and the "Today" program.†He also anchors "The Tim Russert Show," a weekly interview program on CNBC, and is a contributing anchor for MSNBC. In 2001, Washingtonian Magazine named Russert the best and most influential journalist in Washington, D.C., and described "Meet the Press" as "the most interesting and important hour on television." In 2004, Reader's Digest said he was "America's best interviewer." Russert is no stranger to Drake. On the eve of the Iowa caucuses in January 2000, he hosted "Meet the Press" live from Drake's Levitt Hall in Old Main and stopped by the University Bookstore after the broadcast and bought a Drake T-shirt and hat. Besides politics, Russert takes an active role in community groups, serving as a Last year Russert published "Big Russ and Me: Father and Son — Lessons of Life," a book that profiles his father, a World War II veteran. The Martin Bucksbaum Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible by a gift from Melva and the late Martin Bucksbaum, former chairman and president of General Growth Corp. and longtime member of Drake's governing board. The Drake Law School recently honored Retired Lt. Gen. Russell C. Davis, a 1969 Drake law graduate, as Alumni of the Year for his long-time contributions to leadership and philanthropy. “Throughout his unfolding career, Gen. Davis has been an outstanding leader who has risen to the top of his field, an engaged citizen of this community and our nation’s armed forces and a long and faithful supporter of Drake Law School and the University as a whole,” said David Walker, dean of Drake Law School, who presented the award at the Supreme Court Banquet earlier this month. “He is truly an impressive person.” In 1998, Davis became the first African American to be appointed to lead the United States force of nearly 475,000 Army and Air Force National Guard members. He has served as a member of Drake’s Board of Trustees and resigned only to take his top-ranking appointment with the Army and Air National Guard. In his years following graduation from Drake, Davis worked for American Republic Insurance Co., where he became the first African American to serve as a company officer. He became a force for diversity in both his company and the Des Moines community. He also is active with the Kappa Alpha Psi national African American fraternity. Davis, a native of Tuskegee, Ala., and a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, lives in Alexandria, Va. The more sag, the more slobber, the more wrinkles, the better the chances of winning this beauty contest. Some of the droopiest, most wrinkled and just plain adorable bulldogs from all over the Midwest – and sometimes as far away as England – will compete in Drake University’s 26th annual Most Beautiful Bulldog Contest to kick off Drake Relays Festival Week. The event is set for Monday, April 25, at Nollen Plaza Third and Locust Streets, in downtown Des Moines. The first 50 bulldogs to register will participate in the contest to determine Drake’s mascot for the 96th running of the Drake Relays April 28-30. The winning Bulldog will serve as the official mascot for the Drake Relays and appear in the Drake Relays Parade. Starting at 11 a.m., a panel will judge the contestants. A pageant is scheduled for noon. Papa John’s Pizza, the Bulldog Club of Central Iowa and Bark Busters Home Dog Training sponsor the Beautiful Bulldog Contest. “We have enjoyed being one of the sponsors of the contest for many years as well as our relationship with Drake University,” said Judy Robey, a member of the Bulldog Club of Central Iowa. No swimsuits required. On Wednesday, April 6, the "Let's DU Lunch" series will present "It's a Zoo Out There and We're Not Lion!" by Terry Rich, chief executive officer of Blank Park Zoo. The luncheon is open to the public and is sponsored by the Drake University Central Iowa Alumni Chapter and the Greater Des Moines Partnership. The event will begin at 11:30 a.m. in the Younkers Tea Room in downtown Des Moines. The cost is $15 and reservations are recommended. For reservations, contact the Drake Office of Alumni and Parent Programs at x2769 or The Drake University Law School recently honored Daniel L. Power, professor emeritus of law, for more than 30 years of service to the University with a portrait that will hang in the Neal and Bea Smith Law Center, 2400 University Ave. The portrait, painted by artist Mary Muller, shows the beloved professor who was a major trailblazer for Drake’s clinical education programs, with an American flag pin on one lapel and an Irish flag on the other. Power delivers green carnations to various campus staff members every year on St. Patrick’s Day and has organized exchange programs for Irish and Iowa lawyers for several years. As passionate as Power is about Ireland, he is more passionate about the law. “The truest reason for being a lawyer is justice – to see justice done for all humankind in all contexts,” Power said. “It is one of the most delightfully consuming and compelling causes for being alive.” Power came to Drake in 1971 after serving in the United States Department of Justice in the tax division where his trial practice was national in scope. He had served as general counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives for one of its select committees. Power believed in the importance of clinical education in the nation’s law schools and came to Drake to establish a program based on his vision. He developed the Senior Citizens Legal Services Program, a Rural Legal Assistance Program and a Judicial Internship Program that allows students to work with federal and state judges in nearly 40 states. He helped establish Drake’s Prosecutor Internship Program and create the University’s Criminal Legal Defense Clinic. He also enlisted the support of former Rep. Neal Smith to create the Neal and Bea Smith Law Center, which houses Drake’s clinical programs today. “In the process, Power helped to prepare countless good lawyers and render extraordinary service, and he made countless good friends, too,” said David Walker, dean of Drake Law School, after the portrait was unveiled of the law school’s Supreme Court Banquet last Saturday. “He has an Irish strain that gives him pride, a natural charm and exuberance, a delight in life and family, the gift of humor and appreciation for good company.” Outside Drake, Power has served as president of the Iowa AARP and has twice been honored by the Governor of Iowa for distinguished volunteerism. Brooke Burrage-Timmer, a second-year student at Drake University Law School, has been elected to serve as governor for the 8th Circuit of the American Bar Association Law School Division. Burrage-Timmer, who is originally from Aplington, Iowa, and now lives in West Des Moines, was unanimously selected after applying for candidacy and delivering a campaign speech last month. The governor of the circuit is responsible for selecting a board of lieutenant governors within the circuit who will run various ABA activities, such as the Volunteer Tax Program. The governor also assists with boosting membership, takes part in organizing national programs and travels to numerous conferences to represent the circuit. "The Drake Law School has allowed me to do things that would not have been possible at other universities," said Burrage-Timmer, who is also the Student Bar Association president for the Drake Law School. "Drake has given me the opportunity to become involved in many extra-curricular and volunteer activities, which have been extremely beneficial." After law school, Burrage-Timmer plans to pursue a career in the Des Moines area. The Department of Religion and Philosophy’s series of panel discussions about major religions concludes on Monday, April 4, with a discussion of Sikhism, Bahai and Zen Buddhism from 7 to 9 p.m. in Bulldog Theater, Olmsted Center. The event is free and open to the public. Panelists will be the Rev. Zuiko Redding, a resident teacher at the Cedar Rapids Zen Center; Paul Singh, president of the Iowa Sikh Temple; Nabil Hanke, a member of the Des Moines Bahai community; and Danielle Foster-Smith, a Drake alumna and member of the Iowa Chapter of the Soka Gakkai International-USA (Nichiren Buddhism). The Center for Digital Teaching and Learning is offering a series of sessions on instructional technology taught by faculty members. The sessions began March 10 and continue through April 28. Faculty who attend four or more sessions will receive a 512 megabyte jump drive and will be eligible to participate in a drawing for a digital camera. The drawing will take place on April 28. Reservations can be made by e-mailing All sessions will be held in the lower level of Carnegie Hall from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. on the dates listed below: March 31: Close Encounters with E-Journals: Advanced Research Using Library-Hosted Materials April 7: Low Threshold Applications (LTA): Skype, Wiki, Blog, IM, P2P, Wireless, Travel Tips, and More April 14: Assessment and Evaluation in Blackboard: Beyond the Basics April 21: Copyright Issues for Online Situations. April 28: Enhancing your Teaching with Digital Photography |
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